All items listed and reviewed are available for purchase directly from Brickbat Books, although quantities are limited. Brickbat Books is located at 709 South Fourth Street, in the heart of Fabric Row, in Philadelphia.

Michael lay flat on his tummy in the empty bath and peered down the black hole of the waste pipe. He couldn't see anything, so he called softly, "Is anybody down there?"

The was a scuffly noise and a little squeaky voice said, "Yes, me."

"Who's me?"

"The common Bath Google," answered the little voice. "I was the Yellow Imp at the court of the Fairy Queen, but I was naughty once too often and she turned me into a Common Bath Google. I'm not at all happy here."

Thursday, October 28, 2010

According to book designer and stand-up comic Doogie Horner (The Ministry of Secret Jokes) everything—absolutely everything—in the seemingly random universe can be connected, charted, comprehended, and ultimately conquered. Everything Explained through Flowcharts is your one-stop decision-making handbook, packed with meticulous diagrams that will illuminate life’s greatest mysteries—from your afterlife options to the best alien pick-up lines to the smoothest route to world domination. Distinctive and ingenious, Everything Explained through Flowcharts is the only book currently on the market that enables you to trace the labyrinthine connections that order the universe while causing eye strain in seniors.

Everything Explained Through Flowcharts is packed with meticulously designed charts that trace the labyrinthine connections that order the universe, illuminate life's great mysteries, and cause eye strain in senior citizens. Swiss scientists at the prestigious University of Helsinki have said that Everything Explained Through Flowcharts is the closest thing there is to a working unified field theory, and have gone on to claim that they aren't Swiss, aren't scientists, and aren't sure whether or not Helsinki is in Switzerland. And yet the Swiss consulate has not denied that this book contains more than two hundred illustrations, forty mammoth charts, and innumerable supporting graphs and essays, including:

* An illustrated matrix of WWF Finishing Moves * Heavy metal band names taxonomy * The noble art of zeppelin warfare demystified * How to win any argument * Tragedy to comedy conversion chart for comedians * A creepy drawing of a baby skeleton * How to tell if you're an evil twin

Follow Drabble's early work as it progresses from "the well-written, entertaining, but not disturbing The Garrick Year, to the moral ambiguities of The Millstone, to the rather strange, disturbing Jerusalem the Golden and its remorseless ‘survivor’, to the half-mad narrative of The Waterfall." (Joyce Carol Oates)

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

"Gregory Crewdson's photographic series capture a particularly American state of normalcy--in dissolution. The viewer, at first seduced by what appears to be an idyllic scene, soon discovers subtle off-kilter elements more akin to Film Noir than an NBC comedy. In a work from his Twilight series, yellow school buses are parked outside white wooden houses, and students stand and lounge around in seeming passivity. Something is happening--what, we don't know. The vision is familiar yet unfamiliar, seemingly benign yet threatening. Crewdson goes to great lengths in dramatizing his disturbing suburban scenes, employing elaborate lighting, cranes, props and extras, espousing a level of behind-the-scenes preparation more akin to the making of a Hollywood movie than the making of a still image. Here perhaps is one place to locate the eerie unreality and narrativity of his pictures, the creepy attention to detail so out of place, in the ordinary settings he evokes. Middle-class reality meets the other side of the normal here--by way of Sigmund Freud."

Beneath The RosesHardcover

"Beneath the Roses was an exhibition of twenty new large-scale photographs by Gregory Crewdson. In these pointedly theatrical yet intensely real panoramic images, Crewdson explores the recesses of the American psyche and the disturbing dramas at play within quotidian environments.

In Beneath the Roses, anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios. In one image a lone and pregnant woman stands on a wet street corner just before dawn, a small but portentous still point in a world of trajectories. On a stormy night in another nondescript town, a man in a business suit stands beside his car, holding out a hand to the cleansing rain in apparent mystification. In a plush bedroom, a man and a woman – prototypes of middle-class American dislocation – are visited by a songbird, who gazes at the woman from its perch on the vanity unit. Crewdson's scenes are tangibly atmospheric, visually alluring and often deeply disquieting. Never anchored precisely in time or place, these and the other narratives of Beneath the Roses are rather located in the dystopic landscape of the anxious American imagination ." -White Cube

Harangue for Hollywood! From the blighted urban squalor of Detroit–Paris of the Midwest–came enfant terrible Mike White and his mutant publication, Cashiers du Cinemart. For fourteen years and fifteen issues the writers of Cashiers du Cinemart provided a treasure trove of writing on film and popular culture.

This book collects the best articles from the fifteen year history of Cashiers du Cinemart magazine with sections dedicated to Quentin Tarantino, Star Wars, Black Shampoo, Unproduced screenplays, celebrity interviews, and much more. Everything has been refreshed, polished, and improved for this volume of movie mayhem.

“Obsessive, indulgent, wildly erratic, yet Impossibly Funky still warms my hardened critic's heart because of the burning passion for moviegoing of the writer. It’s manifested in the nutty, beyond-left-field takes on popular geeky movies, and, even better, the stretch beyond Lucas and Tarantino to Kenneth Fearing, Travis McGee, and the unheralded comic genius of Canadian cinema, John Paizs. I’ve got to get my butt to Black Shampoo!” – Gerald Peary, critic, The Boston Phoenix

Mike White and his Cashiers approach film writing from a point of the compass I never knew existed. It’s wild navigating out there in the film world and Impossibly Funky makes it a brisk and exhilarating trip while keeping one cool hand on the tiller! – Guy Maddinhttp://www.impossiblefunky.com/

Sunday, October 24, 2010

"The more than two hundred striking duotone plates in Hilla and Bernd Becher's Industrial Facades continue the famous Dusseldorf photographers' formal investigation of industrial structures, in this case the frontal elevations of factory buildings. Like the Bechers' earlier books on water towers, blast furnaces, and gas tanks, Industrial Facades once again clearly displays their serenely cool, rigorous approach to the structures they photograph as vaariations on an ideal form. The Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain their subjects. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place.

Industrial Facades covers the whole range of periods and designs representing this building type: from austere brick buildings of the early industrial age and the arched windows and turrets decorating historicist facades, to the concrete and glass functionalist constructions of the 1950s and 1960s, to today's rectangular, windowless halls.

These photographs give the lie to Louis Sullivan's often misunderstood motto, "form follows function," for the external appearance of the factory buildings shown here are hardly determined by their internal working processes. For this reason, the Bechers' photographs do not really illustrate the development of modern industrial architecture, nor the achievements of functionalist building, but rather the achievements of banal, everyday architecture, produced by builders trained in crafts or by engineers trained in the necessities of the industrial process."

Friday, October 22, 2010

"Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series is published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence."

The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency, Paperback

"A photobook classic, and perhaps the work for which New York photographer Nan Goldin remains best known, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends and lovers collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a late 1970s/early 1980s New York now long gone, and a world that is visceral and seething with life. As Goldin writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.”

Also available:

Cindy Sherman: A Play Of Selves, Hardcover

It was in the mid-70s that Cindy Sherman began making her earliest works, in which she explored various manipulations of her own persona. She began by experimenting with makeup and costumes, getting dressed up for parties and surprising her friends. She then moved on to photograph herself in the various personas she had created, producing highly inventive but somewhat more primitive versions of the seminal work for which she would later become known, the Untitled Film Stills series. It was during this early period that Sherman created A Play of Selves--a visual tale of a young woman overwhelmed by various alter-egos that compete inside of her, and her final conquering of self-doubt. Acted out with 16 separate characters, these 72 photographic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of herself-as-subject in a series of staged photographs. Published here for the first time, these photographs include hundreds of shots of the artist costumed as various characters in dozens of poses. Organized in a four-act "play" with an elaborate, handwritten script, the individual images were cut by the artist from original black-and-white prints. Preface by Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman: Working Girl, Paperback

"When curators at Saint Louis's Contemporary Art Museum asked Cindy Sherman whether there was a moment in her career whose resonance might be underappreciated, one around which she might like to develop an exhibit and a book, she selected her earliest adult creative years, beginning while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in the mid-1970s. Working Girl is full of rarely seen pieces, and it features, for the first time, documentation of and stills from Sherman's 1975 animated short Doll Clothes, which is among the pieces that bring Sherman's early exploration of gender and identity into focus. The mostly small-scale work, including many early black-and-white, hand-colored, and sepia-toned photographs, is culled primarily from the artist's family members' collections and her own, and includes the pieces that laid the groundwork for her first major success, the acclaimed Film Stills series. Working Girl is a unique glimpse into the early development of Sherman's artistic practice, and into the genesis of her inimitable substance and style. It illuminates her conceptual approach to photography and foretells the career that would be launched in the late 1970s, positioning her as one of the most significant artists of our time."

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

"Published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take color beyond advertising and fashion photography, Shore's large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the original series, much of it never before published or exhibited. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore's images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscapes with which Un-common Places is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and portraits. As a new generation of artists expands on the projects of the New Topographic and New Color photographers of the seventies--Thomas Struth (whose first book was titled Unconscious Places), Andreas Gursky and Catherine Opie among them--Uncommon Places: The Complete Works provides a timely opportunity to reexamine the diverse implications of Shore's project and offers a fundamental primer for the last 30 years of large-format color photography."

American Surfaces (out of print)

"In 1972, Stephen Shore left New York City and set out with a friend to Amarillo, Texas. He didn't drive, so his first view of America was framed by the passenger's window frame. He was taken aback by the fact that his experience of life as a New Yorker had very little in common with the character and aspirations of Middle America. Later that year he set out again, this time on his own, with just a driver's licence and a Rollei 35 - a point-and-shoot camera - to explore the country through the eyes of an everyday tourist.

The project was entitled American Surfaces, in reference to the superficial nature of his brief encounters with places and people, and the underlying character of the images that he hoped to capture. Shore photographed relentlessly and returned to New York triumphant, with hundreds of rolls of film spilling from his bags. In order to remain faithful to the conceptual foundations of the project, he followed the lead of most tourists of the time and sent his film to be developed and printed in Kodak's labs in New Jersey.

The result was hundreds and hundreds of exquisitely composed colour pictures, that became the benchmark for documenting our fast-living, consumer-orientated world. The corpus of his work - following on from Walker Evans' and Robert Frank's epic experiences of crossing America - influenced photographers such as Martin Parr and Bernd & Hilla Becher, who in turn introduced a new generation of students to Shore's work."

Monday, October 18, 2010

"Fabulous Diamonds are equally at home in indie gulags, art galleries or disco gullies. Fans of the more esoteric side of Siltbreeze--Blues Control and US Girls, especially--should be mightily chuffed by the beauteous hypnotic (hypnagogic?) pop Fab Ds are laying down here.

The second full-length outing from Fabulous Diamonds is a continuation of the lush and mesmerizing electro / percussive landscapes explored on their self-titled debut LP (released on Siltbreeze in 2008). Jarrod Zlatic and Nisa Venerosa spark lots of musical embers along the way: dub, trance, house, ambient, minimalist, hints of Suicide and Terry Riley--basically everything from Silver Apples to Silver Apples of the Moon."

"Part minimalist drone, part dub, and part pagan sleepover incantation, Melbourne, Australia's Fabulous Diamonds specialize not so much in songs but in pools of unease.... They embrace bass frequencies instead of treble, easy tempos instead of manic energy, and a full-bore penchant for the macabre. But where similarly minded Southern Hemisphere contemporaries like Naked on the Vague brandish sharp edges and jagged textures, Fabulous Diamonds songs are smooth enough to run your fingers over."--Pitchfork

Diane Arbus: Monograph, Hardcover (out of print)Twenty Fifth Anniversary Edition. "New technology has made possible this lustrous new printing from all new film. These landmark images now have a clarity and depth not achievable in earlier editions."

Lisette Model"Lisette Model is an unsurpassed introduction to one of the twentieth century's most significant photographers--a woman whose searing images and eloquent teachings deeply influenced her students Diane Arbus, Larry Fink and many others. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Model's death in 1983, Aperture is reissuing this classic, highly collectible 1979 monograph--the first book ever published on Model--in the original oversized trim and with the original distinctive design by Marvin Israel, along with an updated chronology and bibliography. This timeless volume contains more than 50 of Model's greatest images, from the rich idlers on the Promenade des Anglais in the South of France to the sad, funny and often eccentric inhabitants of New York's most subterranean haunts. As Berenice Abbott said in her preface, "One of the first reactions when looking at Model's pictures is that they make you feel good. You recognize them as real because real people express a bit of the universal humanity in all of us."

Sunday, October 17, 2010

More books! This time around: contemporary fiction, out of print children's picture books and story books, vintage pulp science fiction (many with Richard Powers covers!) old U.K. Penguin editions, and more! Posts to follow!

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Bill Hillmannfounder and Host of The Windy City Story Slam, whichhas performed nationally and internationally as well as receivedinternational acclaim from the press. He was co-director ofFusion Project, an international art promotion company workingin Chicago and Mexico City from 2005-2007 and was named #42 onNew City’s Lit Top 50, 2009. Excerpts from Hillmann's novel inprogress have appeared at FoggedClarity and in the Cubbie BluesAnthology as well as broadcast on Resonance FM in London. He wasalso chosen and honored by Irvine Welsh to read from the novelalongside Stephanie Keunert at the Metro's Read Against theRecession. His poetry has appeared in Make Magazine. Two of hisplays were selected to be staged as part of Columbia College’sStory Week. Hillman is currently a MFA candidate at ColumbiaCollege in Chicago.

Gint Aras(Karolis Gintaras Žukauskas) was born in Cicero,Illinois to Lithuanian immigrants displaced by WWII. He earnedhis MFA from Columbia University and now teaches English andHumanities at Morton College. He is the author of a novelFinding the Moon in Sugar.

Lex SonneLex Sonne grew up in central Kentucky. His fiction has appearedin Night Train, New Madrid, Ghost Factory, and Hair Trigger. Abook of his short stories will be published by Lark SparrowPress in 2010. He is the Co-Founder and Editor of the literarymagazine Somnambulist Quarterly and taught writing at TrumanCollege in Chicago.

Behnam Riahipublished in various local zines: Unbreakable, Chi-Tea, River Currents, is an emerging writer who has performed atWindy City Story Slam and winner of the Columbia College AlumniScholarship, Herman Conaway Award, David Rubin Award, andDiversity Award. He is currently a student at Columbia CollegeChicago.

Sam Allingham"His moral code is firm, but compassionate. In his spare time he writes fiction about his small-town hometown and his friends, all of whom moved..." -Kelly Writer's House

Michael McCarryWinner of Best Storyteller and AudienceFavorite awards at the 2nd Annual Inter-City Story Slam: Phillyvs. DC.

[What Winogrand] has given us in these photographs is a unilateral report of how we behaved under pressure during a time of costumes and causes, and of how extravagantly, outrageously and continuously we displayed what we wanted. --Tod PapageorgePublic Relations is a distillation of a photographic project begun by Garry Winogrand in 1969 when he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph what he called “the effect of media on events.” With his characteristic zeal, passion, spontaneity and intensity, Winogrand photographed an array of public events including museum openings, press conferences, sports games, demonstrations, award ceremonies, a birthday party and a moon shot. The photographs depict our emerging dependence on the media as well as how the media changes and sometimes even creates the event itself. First published to accompany a 1977 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Arrivals and Departures, Hardcover $39.95

If Garry Winogrand photographed everything, all the time, as he is famous for having done, his pictures of airports convey the many still very familiar sights and spaces and sensations attached to air travel. Arriving at an airport, checking baggage, watching other travelers amble, walk and sometimes rush by, luggage trailing and flailing and neatly rolling along, passengers waiting forever on those long rows of attached seats, friends and relatives greeting each other and saying goodbye: everything that happened and stills happens in these vast public spaces. Winogrand's airport photographs were taken over a period of 25 years, with the first frame shot around 1958 and the last in 1983, just months before his death. In Winogrand's archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, there are hundreds of contact sheets containing airport images, and over 1,100 prints of airplanes and airports that Winogrand made during his lifetime. Edited by Alex Harris, one of the first to publish selections from this body of work, in DoubleTake magazine in 1996, and longtime friend and colleague Lee Friedlander, The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand assembles 86 of the photographer's most compelling, never-before published images of travelers, flight attendants, airport waiting rooms, airplanes on runways and all the people and places in between.

Animals, Hardcover (out of print) $39.95

Winogrand's zoo, even if true, is a grotesquery. It is a surreal Disneyland where unlikely human beings and jaded careerist animals stare at each other through bars, exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments.--John Szarkowski

The Animals is a classic photo book by the incessant, masterful photographer Garry Winogrand, reissued in a new edition by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which first published the book in 1968. In it, Winogrand leaves the streets of the city for the caged aisles of the real urban jungle, the zoo, where he captures some of the more humiliating and strange moments in the lives of God's creatures. See a lion stick its tongue out between chain-link fencing, an orangutan pee into another's mouth, a hippo give a great big yawn, two lions lamely going at it, and seals watching lovers kiss.